Salesforce.com is getting ready to armour up Chatter, its social platform, with new functionality to be announced in the US at Dreamforce.

Chatter changes (Credit: Salesforce.com)

Salesforce will announce new Chatter features such as screen sharing, where users can see what the other user is looking at, and instant chat. Salesforce will also be opening up its application programming interface so that Chatter can link to data in third-party apps, such as Microsoft SharePoint or conceivably Yammer. The company will also be announcing a feature that allows companies to interact with customer groups who don't have Chatter for a short period of time, so that they can carry on necessary business conversations.

Inside the service cloud, Salesforce is also planning to pull social enterprise such as Facebook or Twitter into the feed for call centres, so that customer service agents can see whether someone on the internet has already found a solution to an issue their customers are experiencing.

In addition, Salesforce.com is launching an HTML5 app, expected in January, which will be touch focused and independent of device or browser — to be packaged at touch.salesforce.com. According to Salesforce, this makes things easier for independent software vendors who won't have to use the development kit for different platforms such as the iPhone, instead just building their software for HTML5. It also provides a fuller experience, according to the company, which has said that the software development kit can provide limitations.

The news, to be announced by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff in his Dreamforce keynote kick-off, is designed to position the company as a social enterprise leader.

In the grand scheme of the social enterprise, Salesforce.com is looking to link social networks, customer profiles and create product networks. Meanwhile, Salesforce.com is looking to channel all of its properties into a social enterprise bucket.